


All the Pretty, Pretty Pieces

by Jillypups



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Fluff and Smut, R plus L equals J, a little danger, a little plot, i just boarded this ship, jonsa, oh god here i go
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-22
Updated: 2015-08-22
Packaged: 2018-04-16 13:35:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4627206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jillypups/pseuds/Jillypups
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Daenerys sits the Iron Throne while Sansa rules as Queen in the North. Dany's nephew Jon and Sansa were made to marry in order to unite the North and South, and it was not a marriage of love. The night before Jon must leave to head a campaign against the final hold out of would be usurpers in the North, he runs into an unlikely drinking companion.</p><p>::slinks on over from SanSan.:: SO, hi! This is for my darling dearest BAMFiest Bex, who, when I tentatively said I'd like to try a Jonsa prompt, more than delivered on an idea.</p><p> </p><p>  <a href="http://bex-morealli.tumblr.com/post/127283567937/all-the-pretty-pretty-pieces-by-jillypups-for">picset!!</a></p><p> </p><p>  <a href="http://bex-morealli.tumblr.com/post/127284186202/all-the-pretty-pretty-pieces-by-jillypups-for">picset two!</a><br/><a href=""></a></p>
            </blockquote>





	All the Pretty, Pretty Pieces

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bex_xo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bex_xo/gifts).



The godswood is silent, and Jon doesn’t know whether to appreciate it or hate it. Part of him wants discord, riled blood and the beating of swords on shields; the darker, deeper part of him wants the crackle of a hearth, the sound of his lady wife’s sewing, the heavy pant of his wolf. Tomorrow he leaves for the Dreadfort to settle once and for all his aunt’s claim to her throne. Dread it he does.

The snow is a swath of fine white drapery that covers the ground and slopes up the trunks of sentinel pines like skirts that slope up to ladies’ waists, that shapes the otherwise flat landscape into dips and rises and whites and muted blacks. The only sound is when he takes a step, and then it is the crunch and grit of ice and flake beneath his heel, the sound of a decision on whether to go further into the wood or back inside. It is why he has not moved for several minutes.

“Damn,” he says with a cloud of warm breath when he glances down into his cup and sees that it is empty, because now his fate is forced. Jon has no intention of going to bed sober, tonight.

“Good night, brother,” he says to the weirwood tree, to its sad and somber face that sometimes makes him thinks he looks at a mirror and not a heart tree. He chuckles, shakes his head, feels the hard bob of unkempt hair that has turned hard with frost. “Forgive me; I mean  _cousin_ , though if I am not used to it now, I think I never shall be,” he says. “I will return once I bring the Boltons to their knees, and then we shall talk once more.”

Between the tree and him, Jon is the only one who truly speaks, but the acute feeling of being  _heard_  is more than enough for him, and the feel of that mostly silent attendant is the young boy who used to be a brother, who is now less than, who is now  _more_  than all of them put together.

 _King in the North_ , sighs the rustle of red leaves above him.  _King in the North._

“Don’t you start with me, Bran,” he snaps, giving the tall boughs a wine-stained glare before he turns and stalks out of the wood, because of all the names he’s been given that’s the one that sits most ill with him. “Your sense of humor has turned to shit, I’d say,” he calls over his shoulder.

The leaves shake and they laugh and they do not care.

“King in the North,” he mutters, slamming his way into the earthy warmth of the kitchens where he stalks towards one of the fat barrels lined up against the far wall. “He’s dead and unburied, and here stands the mummer trying to, ah, hells,” he says when he bends over to depress the wine barrel’s spigot and the thing spurts wine over his ungloved hand.

“Trying to what?” says the slow honey drip of a voice behind him.

Jon stands upright with a start, spins on his heel to see his lady wife sitting at the rough-hewn table and bench in the back of the room. She is long limbed and regal even wrapped up in the bulk of furs, her damp hair a loosely woven dull shine in the light from what’s left of the kitchen fire. Jon sucks in a breath, holds onto it like he’d hold onto her, lets it go the way she leaves his bedchambers after her wifely duty strikes her conscience.

“Trying to fill my cup,” he says once he’s dug up and rediscovered his voice.

Sansa stretches her neck and lifts her chin, gazes down the line of her nose as if she can see into his cup from there.

“I wager it’s full enough, my lord,” she says, and it’s prim like it always used to be, her voice, but now it’s sharpened dark like a black blade from all those years with her mentor, all spun sugar with the poison of sarcasm and the dry draught of wit.

“Do not call me your lord; it’s a stone’s throw from Lord Snow, and I’d not hear that again for the rest of my lifetime,” he says, gazing down into his cup once more, half pleased it’s full as she said, half angry it’s not empty so that he may fill it once more. But he does his best to gain the second wish, takes a healthy swallow all while watching Sansa over its rim.

“Your Grace, then?” she says, light and heavy, sweet and scalding.

“This humor of yours must run in the family,” he mutters against the wooden lip of his cup.

“I’m sorry, my lord, I did not hear you; I do not speak the tongue of wine, tonight,” she says, her lovely head a tip to the side as she regards him, and it’s then that he sees how angry she is.

 _I am angry, too,_  he thinks, he lies maybe, because it’s sorrow more than rage, regret more than ire, but still. They are all there inside him, well-honed on the whetstone of constant inspection, and they can easily come out to spar.

“Then speak it you shall. If I am to play king, if I am to play lord and husband, than I bid you drink with me tonight. I suffer from no companion; would a lady such as you make a man suffer?” he says, trying on his best sprightly knightly prose, maybe to sting her back.

Jon grabs a fresh cup from the board, drinks from his as he strides towards his wife. He sets her cup down with a hollow slap that makes her jump, and for some reason that gets his blood up; he sets his own down with another red splash on his fingers.

“I- oh, well, all right, but only to drink to your success. I mean, only the one drink,” she says.

He snorts and shrugs his displeasure at so shallow an offering, turns back to snag a pewter flagon off a wooden shelf, and once he fills it and turns back to her, he catches her mid-gulp, her pale cheeks puffed out with a mouthful of wine, his own cup nested between the white doves of her hands. Sansa’s eyes widen when Jon laughs with his head thrown back, and he hears her snort, hears the choke-gag-gasp of her after she’s swallowed her prize.

“You weren’t supposed to see that,” she says, hand over her heart as she catches her breath and tries to chase that blush off her face.

“If the lady needs a drink then she needs a drink. Who am I to stop her?” he says, setting down the flagon before swinging first one leg and then the other over the bench across from her.

“You are king, my lord, you may do as you wish,” she says, blue gaze black in this low sooty light, blue gaze a drop to the cup she clasps in her hands on the tabletop.

Oh, the things he could say to such a tossed out comment.

“Then drink as your king commands,” he says bitterly, pouring her more wine, nodding when she lifts the cup to her mouth again, and when she drinks he watches, when she swallows he watches that too.

“You are up late tonight,” he says after a few moments of awkward silence, pins and needles like when he limbs fall asleep after a long ride. “Could you not sleep?”

“No,” she murmurs, gesturing to a small plate at her elbow with a heel of bread and a rind of cheese on it. “No, I could not.”

“Nor I,” Jon says. “I have no great wish to ride against Boltons again. I have no great wish to send my men into a flayer’s den. _I_  certainly do not wish to be flayed,” he sighs, and he holds his head in his hands with his elbows on the table, his hair cold and wet from the thawed frost and snowfall. It is a rare moment of vulnerability that they never share, here where he admits his fears, here where shadows of past battle flicker on the stone walls of his heart.

“Then stay. Kings call their banners and send their men without leaving the safety of their keeps. You do not have to go, my lord, you do not have to play brave for bravery’s sake,” she says.

His downcast eyes catch the tentative slide forward of her hand across the table before it stops and retreats to curl around her cup. When Jon lifts his eyes he sees her drink, a long, low swallow that empties her cup. She nods when he lifts the flagon, and he pours Sansa another, the dark wine a ripple to the very brim.

“Bravery? Think you me  _brave_  for going? I do not do it for  _show_ , my lady, I do it because I should. Because it does not do, sending men to a war you yourself are too craven to join.”

“I am not calling you a  _coward_ ,” she snaps, sweeping up to a stand as she snatches the cup off the table, and now he’s not the only one made to lick spilled wine from his fingers. “I am  _trying_  to get you to act like a  _king._ ”

“I am no king and you know it. It was Robb who was king. I am nothing more than your consort, my  _lady._  You are Queen in the North by rights, I merely gave my cloak to ensure it, to make sure Daenerys did not snatch you up and sell you off to a Tyrell or Martell or some other crotchedly old Southron lord itching for a young blooded wife,” he says, and he’s halfway to a shout when he swings one leg over the bench, straddling it as he glares at her.

“ _What?_ ” she says, staring at him with angry bewilderment.

In the two months they have been married, it is the first time he has ever mentioned how and why that came to be, and he is stuck now between the mortification of letting slip a well-kept secret, and the giddy rush of letting the truth wash her over. He goes for the latter, throws himself completely over so he can swim in it.

“Aye, milady,” he says, slipping into poor man’s speak as he stands and steps into her. “Milady aunt, our fair queen would not have you roost up here surrounded by fealty that could overthrow her. It was to a Southron man or none until I offered up a Targaryen bridegroom.”

Sansa shakes her head with a squint as if this truth is too bright and searing to stare directly into, and she blinks through a frown that wrinkles the lovely smooth of her brow. He thinks back to the solemn morning in the godswood, the Stark colors in full effect with the grizzled grey tree trunks and the iron sky above, the snow on the ground and falling all around them. How the black and red of his cloak swallowed her up, how it looked just how he felt to be so instantly folded up into a new and foreign House. At least Sansa had her ceremony; all Jon had was a funeral pyre and war, the scream of dragons and a scrap of knowledge sent to the Wall from Howland Reed.

“But you- when you rode in, it was- you said it was Daenerys who wished to unite the North and the South. It’s why Arya is betrothed to Aegon, it’s why you are here,” she says, the normal ribbon of her voice a tangle now that she stumbles over this knowledge. Sansa drains her cup of wine for the fortification or for the numbness or for both.

“Yes, it’s why Arya is in the South, but  _I_  am here to keep the North for you, my lady,” he murmurs. “It is why I ride out to my doom, maybe,” he says, dropping his gaze to her mouth when it parts, a mouth he has not kissed since their wedding day.

“Do  _not_  put tomorrow on my shoulders, Your Grace,” she says with another angry snap. “Do not hang death on my door.”

“You’re upset, that I see, though I don’t see  _why._ I give you the North, I fight to keep it  _for_  you and to prove to Daenerys that you hold the North for her, and yet you’d have me think that I have done some wrong,” he says, and now the hay-strewn room is full of their voices, dips and rises that pitch on waves of anger. “So tell me, my queen, what have I done to earn your ire?”

“You have only been here two  _months_ , hardly time for anything except to call your banners and assemble your troops to ride south to the Dreadfort,” she says, and he snorts.

“She wants me to be King in the North and yet when I act as such it is still not up to snuff,” he says with a roll of his eyes, and  _that_  makes her all the angrier, and now his blood is up to see the veneer of her crack, to see the wolf in her break loose, and it’s no pup named Lady there inside her.

“I’m upset because I don’t want you to  _leave_ , you- you  _idiot,_ ” she says, stepping into him so quickly he has no time to react when she shoves him so hard in the chest that he staggers back.

“I do it for  _you_ ,” he snarls, because he is as much a wolf as she is, and he looks down at her, at the pretty of her face when she is whipped up into such fervor.  _Would that I could whip her up,_  he thinks.

“How can you say such a thing? You  _ignore_ me,” she says with a rapid fire blink. “You- You step around me like I am a septa, you ignore me save for holding court for your people, you don’t even- you- and then you will leave,” she says, forge hot and as dangerous. “Am I really so easy to leave?”

“I ignore  _you_?” He laughs with a shake of his head, because he feasts on her whenever he can, and the downcast of her eyes is often enough that she simply never sees it. “You, the wife who cannot even look on her husband when she is in his  _bed_? You with your eyes closed and your jaw clenched. Is it so hard to look at me?”

“I’m looking at you  _now_ , aren’t I?” she tosses at him, and oh, how she looks at him, and they’re close enough for him to see the blue of her eyes and the flicker of her rage, and being the one to put it there is almost as good as being the one to make her moan.

“Look on, then,” he says as he slides his hand beneath the warmth of her hair to grasp the nape of her neck. “Look on and watch your king,” he says roughly, tugging her towards him as he lowers his head to kiss her, and she does moan then. It chases the whimper right out of her and into his open mouth, and he thinks he’s never tasted honey so sweet.

 

Before the world burned and fell apart, Sansa would spend afternoons in the hot springs with her sister, and they would bathe and splash as minnows do, their shifts blooms of linen below the surface of the water. Arya would dunk down to wet her hair but Sansa preferred the overwhelming warmth of the curling steam, and she’d keep her face just above water to breathe it in and wonder what suffocation from heat would be like.

When he walks her until her back is against the wall and pins her in place, she knows _._  When his teeth nip down on the swell of her lower lip, she knows; when Jon opens his mouth and by chain of command opens her own, when he pushes his tongue against hers, oh,  _she knows._

Her hands slide up and over his cloak, wind around his shoulders, keep him close for fear of it all bursting apart like ice on a pond, because they have never kissed like this before –  _just the once, as cold and brief as a snowflake melting on my mouth –_ and the thought of it suddenly ending lathers her in a sort of panicked state of hunger that he seems to share.

There’s a low sound coming from him and she realizes he is humming, that the rumble of his chest is the sound of his contentment, and it’s deep like a beast’s and she has the pleasure of knowing that she’s bringing it up and out of him.  _All from a kiss,_  she thinks, because when he’s pushed into her before it was all duty for the getting of an heir, because whenever they laid together in the past it was tepid and cool, the slow and steady rhythm of a wheelhouse on a deserted road. Nothing like this, nothing like this kiss –  _This king of kisses –_ where they gasp against each other, where his hands yank away her furs to find and cup the curves of her, and if it was cold between the sheets with him before, it is overwarm here.

He groans against her throat when she tilts her head back for him, as far as she can with the wall at her back, and she feels stone snag her hair just as Jon reaches down to snag the skirts of her dress. His hand is deliciously cold when it finally draws up layer after layer, tossing each one up and over his wrist until he has the touch of her skin. One hand seems jealous of the other, and he finally loosens the tight grip on the back of her neck where he held her like a kitten by the scruff, and there is another cup and knead over her dressing gown. His palm is full of her breast and it makes her sigh out his name, sigh out an  _Oh,_ sigh out her want.

“Sansa,” he says, and her name comes out of his mouth in the curl of a question, but she’d have no tentative query from him, not when she knows now that he has the power and will to  _take._

“ _Yes_ , Jon,” she says, impatient and impudent.  _Take, take, take,_  she thinks as her fingers fumble with the clasp of his cloak, as  _I do it for you_  rolls around in her head like a river stone. “Yes, do it for me, please,” she pants carelessly, not quite hearing herself, not quite understanding anything except the bush of his fingers on bare skin, on how the northerly roam of his hand has lifted her loose nightdress almost to her ribs.

“I will do anything you ask,” he says against her mouth before she is silenced with another kiss, and now he has both her breasts in his hand, one between gown and shift, the other skin on skin, his callouses a tantalizing rough scrub against her nipple as he kneads his fingers into her. “Tell me, my wife, my beautiful queen,” he breathes. “Mine,” he adds, a murmured afterthought that hits her like a strike of lightning right between the legs.

“Make me-  _oh_ ,” she says as he kisses her throat, and he is nip and lick, suck and bite, he is relentless, and there is a fleeting stab of surprise when she wonders if this is what love is like. “Make me undone, Jon, make me- take me apart,” she begs, her hands useless against the training leathers over his chest, and her fingers scrabble to his sides to find the buckles and the ties until his hands leave her body to free his own.

“Stupid bloody- there, that’s it,” he sighs with relief once they’ve gotten him free, when he hauls it off and up over his head so that he’s nothing but a tunic and breeches, boots to his knees and the rise and fall of heavy breath. “Now you,” he says, rounding on her after he tosses his boiled leather to the floor where he cast her furs, and she sucks in a sharp gasp of surprise when he bends his knees and grips her on the backs of her thighs, hauling her up and into his arms.

“Oh gods,” she whispers when he turns and sets her down on the table, fingers nimble as he undoes the ribbons of her dressing gown where they are tied and looped at her waist.

“Which gods,” he says, grunting an  _Ah_  when he’s got her in nothing but her nightdress, when the heavy gown is pushed off her shoulders and down her arms to pool on the table. “Which gods hear us now, Sansa? Which gods watch us,” he says as she drapes her forearms over his shoulders.

“All of them,” she says, grabbing two fists of his tunic at his back, and she tugs, makes him bow his head for her as she pulls it off of him, and she tosses it aside to work the stays of his breeches.

“No,” he says, batting her hands away, and she frowns, whimpers with frustration when he pushes her back until she lies supine on the table.

“Please, Jon, I- you said you’d do anything, don’t toy with me,” because he’s rucking her dress up and over her knees even though he still stands half clothed.

“I am not toying with you,” he says as he lowers down into a squat, and there is a terrifying arc of fear and thrill, of panic and  _wantwantwant_  when he tucks his hands behind her knees and drags her down the length of table towards him, and the action drags up her skirts, brings the bare of her flesh in direct contact with the wood. “I am following my queen’s orders. I am doing as my wife bids me,” he says.

“I don’t- Jon, I don’t under-  _oh,_ ” she whimpers, hissing the inhale through her teeth when he presses his mouth to the high juncture between her legs, his face buried in the cradle of her thighs, his hands an upward slide across the soft slope of her low belly.

Her face burns, initially from shame but then from the brazen lick of his tongue that parts her and delves inside, and she thinks that this is how he will tear her in two, a white hot split down the center of her, a sweet spice that flares to life when he runs his tongue up and something makes her jump. Sansa’s legs hitch up off the edge of the table, her hips buck as he sets his rhythm on her, as he laps her up like a cat with cream.  _This is what it means to be devoured,_  she thinks,  _and I hope there is nothing left of me when he’s done._

Thoughts scatter like a flock of birds and she is mindless save for the roll of his tongue and how the wet of him has somehow translated into the wet of her, and she feels like melted snow from the fire of him. And then out of nowhere, or perhaps it was here all along, somehow all those pliant feelings like the soft lick and suck of him, all these delicacies like the press of his mouth to her gather and harden like a glass bead right where his tongue won’t stop, won’t stop, won’t stop, and she digs her heel into his shoulder as her hips lift once more, and she stammers out a cry that sounds like an echo because she cannot stop.

Her arms jerks to the side and she feels the bump of a cup and a plate, hears the clatter of clay and the spatter of wine, and then he hums against the slippery slick of her, and  _now_  she goes mad, clutches her hair at her temples because everything breaks. Resolve and tension snap like threads, her legs sag open like the covers of a book, and now all she can say is his name, over and over and over again until she feels like she’s drowning in it.

 

The writhe of her has him so hard it nearly hurts, and before she even comes for him he’s unlaced and has himself in hand, though the strokes are brutally slow to keep from losing absolute control. But it’s much too much when she finally lets go and allows him to do as she asked, to take her apart and leave her in such pretty, pretty pieces, and he stands swiftly when her thighs part and that last  _Jon_  comes rolling off her tongue, his breeches a sag halfway down his arse.

“Lovely Sansa,” he says as he gazes at her, at the languid sprawl of her here in this room, here on this table, as he soaks up the sight of his handiwork. “My lovely girl. I have wanted to sup on you for longer than you’d care to know,” he says, his hands two slides up her hips, up, up, up her sides. he leans over her to drag away her nightdress, to draw it up and over her lovely breasts, up and over her flushed face so he can discard it, and the motion brings his bare erection right into the sweet salt of her, the same that is on his tongue.

“Please,” she says, drunk from wine and anger and the good rush of a strong climax. “Please, Jon,” she says, and if she thinks she needs to beg him then she hasn’t been paying enough attention tonight.

“No matter,” he murmurs against the firm rise of her nipple before he takes her breast into his mouth. “I’ll have your attention now,” he says.

“You do, you do, I’m- you have it, you have me,” she says, voice high pitched as it rides an inhale of breath.

“Good.”

It takes the barest of guidance from his hand, and with a groan he seats himself fully inside her, the hot clamp of her a sudden seize that makes him immediately stop for fear of losing himself already. And then there is the wriggle and squirm of her, the mewl and complaint as she arches her back, presses herself against him, here where he is still half folded over her.

“Gods, woman,” he groans, and lowers his head so his forehead rests on her collarbone.

It takes one pull back and one forward thrust before her legs lift to wrap around him, and now what he’s doing to her is as much being done to him. The flex of her thighs and the squeeze of her around him, the drag of her nails down his sides, marks to match the rise of his ribs, and this is being fucked, this is being consumed, this is being truly inside her, inside his woman and wife and queen.  _Mine,_ he thinks.  _For the first time, she’s mine._

“Oh gods yes, yes, yes, yes,” she says when he straightens and tugs her up into a sit, and she reaches behind her to brace a hand on the tabletop, fingers of the other a tight fist in his hair that’s damp now from sweat instead of snow.

“ _Yes_ ,” he agrees, cupping the underside of her thigh, pressing his other hand to the small of her back as he holds her tight up against him.

He doesn’t last much longer, not with the slap of flesh and the bounce of her breasts against him, not with the slide of her tongue against his before the kiss breaks when she lets her head drop back.

“Jon,” she moans to the ash blackened beams above them, her fingers a dig and slide through the sweat on his shoulders.

“Say it again,” he says, pumping hard, determined to fuck the word right out of her if need be. “Say my name, Sansa, say it,” he says, because he’s not a lord and he’s not a king, not truly, but every time she cries out for him he thinks she must  _know_ him.

“Jon,” she says, “Jon, Jon, Jon,” over and over again to the rhythm of each buck and thrust, his name ballooning with each sigh and moan until his toes curl in his boots.

“Fuck,” he grits out between two erratic slides inside her, rhythm overcome now. It’s a single heartbeat before he comes with a rush and a shudder, with the stammering gust of a groan as he spills himself inside her, his name still on her tongue, the taste of her still on his.

 

She’s a limp drape of a woman on the table when he slips out of her and lowers her back down, his body following so she has the heat of his skin against hers just as she has the firm of wood on her back. Pinned between the hot and cold, the soft and the rough, stuck like a bug in amber between satisfaction and a bottomless thirst for more. Sansa sighs when he rises up on his elbows above her, hums when he kisses her full mouthed and slow, the kiss of a dream state, the kiss of contentment.

“Don’t go,” she murmurs when he finally straightens, gazing down at her again as if she is a feast laid out for a king, and the thought makes her laugh, breathless and spent, foolish from exertion and dumb from pleasure.

“Do I make you laugh, Sansa?” he smiles, fastening his breeches before bending down to retrieve her nightdress.

“You make me moan, ser,” she says as he takes her by the hand and pulls her upright, but his eyebrows raise and he shakes his head, and she smiles with a downward flick of her gaze. “You make me moan,  _Jon,_ ” she corrects, and he nods.

“Good,” he says again. “That is all I have ever wanted.”

They dress themselves and each other like repairing a broken mirror, a shard here and a shard there, and she wonders if they will become mixed up and sealed into new creatures. Sansa with flecks of him, Jon with slivers of her. She certainly feels different now.

They whisper and laugh together as they hurry across the yard towards the keep, his arm a protective –  _No,_  she thinks, _possessive –_ grip across her shoulders as he ushers her through the snow, Ghost a silent trot across their path as he leaves one midnight mission for another. There is a loud crackling boom from outside the walls of the courtyard by the hunter’s gate, the sudden rush of what sounds like an enormous bonfire, and the subsequent roar of laughter.

“Your brother’s Skagosi men sound ready for war,” Jon murmurs as he guides her inside the keep, and though he sounds amused at the wild antics of Rickon’s warriors, the reminder of what’s to come only serves to make her sad.

He strips her bare once they’re in the confines of his chambers and he stokes up the fire in his hearth, and she stands naked before him as she undresses him all over again, slower this time thanks to sated urgency, and in the thicker, brighter light she has the luxury of painting his skin with her fingertips. He closes his eyes as she traces scars and the ridges of muscle, the two knolls of hipbone before her gaze drops to the thick patch of dark hair covering his groin, and when she grazes him with the flat of her open palm he sucks in a breath through his teeth.

It’s lemon-and-honey slow when he takes her again, her back to the featherbed, her knees pinning his ribs before he unfolds one of her legs to sling it up over his shoulder. It’s kisses across her face, the suck of his tongue into her mouth, the push and the pull of him as he slides in, as he draws out to leave her empty and bereft before he’s back inside her where he belongs.

“Don’t ever leave me again,” she whispers against his ear as he rocks into her, as she thinks on all these revelations this evening has provided. Things like  _I merely gave my cloak to ensure it_  and  _I do it for you,_  and there is hope in her heart that he meant it all. “Don’t you _dare_ ever go, Jon.”

“Never,” he says, and her heart surges to hear it because he’s listened finally, because he will stay with her.

 _Send out the Skagosi and the Mormonts, the mountain clans and the Manderlys. But you stay here and be my king,_  she thinks later when they’re curled up on their sides and the fire has faded, when they fit together like shells from the sea, two curves of flesh and bone.  _I don’t want to be alone._

The morning light filters through heavy snowfall that casts his chambers in muted shades of white, but it is softened into the color of candlewax and flame to see Sansa still stretched and sleeping in his bed. He’s in his boots and breeches, is lacing on his vambraces before heading down to the armory to suit up in full, but it’s halfhearted with such a sight next to him. Her auburn hair is a fanned out tousle on the pillow beneath her head, her long body a twist with her breasts just visible beneath the thin stretch of a sheet. Jon need only to close his eyes and he has the memory of both of them, in his hands and his mouth, above him when he woke her once more sometime before dawn and dragged her on top of him. Still, he is a greedy man now that he’s been so sweetly treated, and so he leans over from where he sits on the edge of the bed dressing himself, slides his open hand from her navel to her left breast, palming the soft squeeze and roll of it. He winces from want, from how he’s already half hard at the fleeting, unrealistic thought of undoing everything and sliding naked back in bed, sliding hard back inside her.

She smiles in her slumber with a distant, faraway moan, her head a tip and tilt into the pillow when he moves to give his love and attention to the other, and it’s an exquisite sort of misery here, minutes before he must leave her, because he cannot help himself. Not when she arches into him, not when she is so pliable under his touch when before she was as ungiving as steel, not when she lifts a hand to press it on top of his as she opens her mouth to sigh. Her other hand slides across the bed to find him, and she frowns in confusion a moment before she opens her eyes. Sansa is all drowsy blink and half-conscious smile when she sees him, and he smiles sadly in return.

“Come back to bed, Jon. Ill manners indeed to leave your wife so unattended,” she says, the bladed edge of her voice gone now, leaving behind something that makes him think of warm bread and spiced wine, of honey cakes and the hot way she comes against his mouth.

“You know I can’t.”

Her frown returns and she opens her eyes for true now, and wide bright blue blinks as she looks up at him.

“What do you mean? Surely you aren’t- _no_ , Jon, you told me. You said so last night that you wouldn’t go,” she says, the honey in her voice thinning out to vinegar as it rises in pitch.

“I said- what I meant is that I- what I thought  _you_  meant was that I’d not leave you to the way we were before. Cold and touchless, at arm’s length, my lady,” he says, and her eyes flash. From sleep to venom, just like that.

“Don’t you ‘my lady’ me, Jon,” she snaps, tossing away the hand he presses to her breast as she sits up.

“My love, then,” he murmurs, and that makes her freeze a moment as she stares at him. “Sansa, please don’t,” he tries, but it snaps her loose and she flings the covers off before swinging her legs over the edge of the mattress.

“’Please don’t’,” she singsongs, dragging her dressing gown on over her bare skin, drawing the length of her hair out from under it before she ties it in place. “I say that enough to you and still you ride out to battle,  _again._  It’s been years, Jon, when does it end? Will another one of us have to die before it stops? You and Rickon riding out, and Arya gone to the dragons in the south. Robb is gone and Bran is, I don’t even know what Bran is,” she says, and her voice breaks on the sudden rush of a sob.

Jon gets to his feet and crosses the room in time to catch her on the forward sway, her face buried in her hands as he holds her to his chest. He closes his eyes and runs his hands down the tangle of her hair, kisses her temple and rests his chin on the crown of her head.  _Where the real crown sits._

“You listen to me, Lady Sansa, Queen in the North. Your husband rides to secure the North for you. I will ride out and I will slay those bloody halfwits for being fool enough to stand against the Starks. And I  _will_ come back to you, wife, because I- because,” he says, taking a breath for strength, not liking how weak it is compared to last night’s wine. “Because I love you, and I refuse to be snuffed out without seeing you again. Do you understand me?” he demands, voice rough as he draws back to look down at her, his finger curled under her chin as he tips her face up.

“Yes,” she whispers, eyes rimmed wet from crying.

“This is what I am here for, Sansa. This is what I must do, and you must rule here as you were made to do. Robb was once king, and that makes you queen so long as Rickon rules Skagos and Arya primes to sit as a Southron queen one day. You must allow me to do my part so that you can do yours.”

“Yes,” she whispers, her hand coming up to wrap lightly around his wrist as he holds her chin in place. “Yes, Jon.”

“You watch me, Sansa. You hear me now, and you watch me when I come back for you. I am a man of my word. “

He kisses her, rougher than he intends but time is slipping away, and her cheeks are wet enough to make his damp with her tears, and he wonders if she cries for him or for herself, and he desperately, desperately hopes for one though he thinks it’s likely the other.

 

Sansa watches the long line of men as they march south from Winterfell, the bleak snow-struck light glinting off of spear points and knights’ armor, off metal finery decorating coursers and swords on foot soldiers’ hips. Her husband rides at the head of the line, and though it’s so far down the Kingsroad that she can no longer see it, still she stands on the outer wall, wrapped in one of the furs from his bed with his wolf at her side.

“He will come back,” she says. “He will come back to us,” she repeats more firmly this time, her hand a drop to drift through white wolf’s fur. “Because he is a man of his word, Ghost,” she says.

 _Because he loves me,_  she thinks.

 

“I cannot tell if you are a happy man or a miserable one,” Rickon says, all seventeen year old swagger on his shaggy island pony, his long legs a dangle with no saddle or stirrup to tuck them up.

“I am married,” Jon says. He thinks of her tears, thinks of her kisses, thinks of the look in her eyes when he told her he loved her. He thinks of the lack of a return sentiment, and he soldiers on. “A married man is often both,” he says.

Rickon laughs, dropping his reins to catch the water skin one of his men tosses to him as he canters by.

“Perhaps it’s being king that makes you so dour,” he says, tipping his head back to guzzle water, uncaring that it dribbles down his throat in cold rivulets. “I wed my Baratheon doe a year ago, and I’m happy. Exhausted, but happy,” he says, recapping the skin before he hurls it at another one of his men.

“Exhausted is another one,” Jon says, unable to keep from smiling with the sudden onslaught of vivid memory, tactile and limber beneath his thoughts.

“Careful, Your Grace,” Rickon says. “It’s still my sister you’re talking about.”

 

 _He is a man of his word,_  she thinks as she flies down the steps from her bedchamber, her feet soft-slippered shuffles that barely touch stone as she hurries down towards the courtyard.  _Even if it takes him three months to make good on it._ The entire keep is a bustle and dash, has been since the horns sounded on the south wall half an hour earlier. They woke her with a jolt of panic from a hearthside nap in Jon’s solar, and it’s from there she’s running, the billow of one of his old cloaks flared out around her as she pushes open the keep’s doors and walks out into the brilliance of a cold, crisp afternoon.

 _The raven just came in ahead of them, Your Grace. It is a victory, to be sure. Minimal loss on your husband’s side,_  said Maester Tarly.  _And the Dreadfort has been razed._

Her eyes flicker left and right, up and down as she searches faces, and the madcap to and fro of the household running to give aid to travel- and battle-weary soldiers dizzies and spangles her vision. She sees the wild tattooed men from Skagos, dried blood still spattered on their bare chests despite the long journey back, watches them joke and slap each other on the backs, but no other member of the party seems as lighthearted as they, especially when they ride with victory at their heels.

“Where is- you there,” she says to a passing squire. “Where is your king, where is Jon Targaryen?”

“I wouldn’t rightly know, milady, he traveled so slowly behind us,” he says with a clumsy bow before trotting off with his wiry arms full of saddle.

“Slowly,” she repeats dumbly, shielding her eyes with her hand from the glare of the overcast sky.

“Oh, damnation,” Satin says as he materializes at her side, and when she glances up at Jon’s steward he is frowning and pointing through the open south gate. “Seven hells,” he swears again. “Forgive me Your Grace, I must go to him,” he says, taking off at a dead run, and because she cannot see what he does, because she has panic roiling in her belly now, Sansa runs after him.

She is dressed plainly as she always does but the red of her hair is enough to announce who she is, and the hustle and bustle parts for her as she follows closely on Satin’s heels. The step-aside that her staff and Jon’s men do for her gives her a straight shot view through the gate to where the road winds through Winter Town. She stops when she sees her brother leading two horses by the bridle. Lean bodied Rickon, as bare chested as his men and no less spattered in blood than they, limps but a little as he walks between a dapple grey pony and a tall brown horse with a rider slumped to the side in the saddle.

“No,” she whispers with a violent shake of her head. “No, he promised,” she says. “He’s- Jon is a man of his word,” she says.

“Fetch me your maester,” Rickon shouts when Satin finally jogs up to them, tossing his pony’s reins to a passing kitchen maid who drops her basket of grain to catch them with bewilderment. “It’s not- no, _don’t_ ,” he says when Satin removes one of Jon’s boots from his stirrup to help his lord and king dismount.

Jon, whose arm is slung up tight and close to his chest, sags forward over his pommel before he slides off the saddle entirely, and Sansa screams when he hits the cold hard earth with a sound she can hear from this distance. Her hand flies to her mouth as she rushes forward before it flies to her stomach, because the panic and fear there threaten to spill out onto the ground by her lord husband, her king, her Jon, this man she has grown to love.

 _I am Lady Sansa, I am Queen in the North, I am Jon’s wife. I am a wolf and I will bite,_  she thinks as she strides up the stairs she just ran down. Her jaw clenches so tightly her head pounds, throbbing at her temples where he kissed her that one sad morning three months ago, but her hand rests on the bloodied one belonging to her husband as he is carried on a stretcher to his bedchambers, Satin and Rickon at his head and feet, Maester Tarly huffing behind as Gilly follows them with baskets of clean linen and lamb’s wool. _I am a queen, I am strong. I have to be strong._

“Tell me again, Rickon,” she says, holding firm to an iron voice and a will twice as tough, because if she lets go she will scream and never stop. She will tear out her hair and rip these fools limb from limb if they let him die.

“He was shot through with an arrow in his leg and run through with a sword in his shoulder. He fought like an animal, though. The shield blow to his other arm is what did him in though, and he fell from his horse before I could get to him.”

Sansa lets her eyes close for the barest of moments as they pause so she can unlatch the door. Arrow, sword, blunt force, a fall on the battlefield. She suppresses a shudder and swallows a sob.

“Was he trampled? Are his- does he bleed on the inside?” she asks as they spill into the room, Rickon and Satin making a grunting, labored-breath straight shot for the bed.

“Not that I saw,” her brother says, his long auburn hair streaked through with mud and what she suspects is blood. He glances up at her, his usual savage mirth replaced with taut severity. “And not that I know.”

“Careful now,” Maester Tarly says. “Don’t roll him off, let me- here, Gilly, would you please- and yes, you as well, Lady Sansa,” he says as the three of them work together to move Jon as gingerly as they can from the rawhide stretcher to the soft mound of his bed.  _Our bed,_ she self-corrects, because he will live to see another night with her, will live to hear her say she loves him, all the gods be damned.

She watches the maester strip down and stitch up her motionless husband, sits in dutiful, teeth-gritted silence as she drags a cool wet cloth across his dirty forehead, lightly combs through the mess of his hair with her fingers. She keeps an eye trained on Tarly’s hand, having an impeccable one herself; Sansa is fully prepared to push him out of her way if he makes so much as one infinitesimal error.

 _You love me,_  she thinks later once it’s all said and done, once Gilly banks the fire and the sun slides off under the horizon, leaving his room dark and warm, quiet and empty save for Jon, Sansa and Ghost who stretches out in front of the closed bedchamber door.  _You love me and I love you. You told me you’d lay eyes on me again, so open them._

“Open your eyes,” she murmurs, getting up with a sore backed stretch from the wooden chair by his bed, walking around so she can crawl up over the covers to sit beside him.

He is pale, drawn, thinner than she remembered and all the more deadly looking for it, even in poppy induced sleep. War has carved into him, made deep cuts of muscle all the deeper on his stomach and in the curve-slope rounds of his arms. He is lethal, lean and mean, if only he would-

“Open your eyes, Jon. I’ve much to tell you,” she says, lightly lifting his limp hand from the bed to clasp it here on her lap. “I’ve spent three months waiting for ravens, three months waiting for your return. I’ve spent three months growing for you, learning for you, all to make you proud, all to make your bloodshed worth it. And I’ve- oh, Jon, I’ve grown to love you, and I love you so helplessly, and now you- now you’re just lying here, and you _vowed_ you would see me again. You swore it. So please, see me, Jon. See _this,_ ” she says, scooting a bit to the side to place his palm on her stomach, mindful of the horrible bruises that blacken his left shoulder. “I mean, there’s nothing to see _yet_ , not really, but it’s there, and you should- _oh_ ,” she says, sucking in a shivery breath as she stares down at her lap.

His hand flexes, fingers a slow stretch as he presses his palm to the faintest curve of her belly that seems to grow so slowly. Sansa exhales, letting her head thud back on the wooden headboard as her shoulders sag with relief, and she takes her hands off of his, lets him roam free as his hand skates a sluggish wander across the heavy wool of her dress. Aside from bumping shoulders with the staff in the halls she has not been touched in three months, and the comfort and delight, the firelight glow of happiness to be so caressed spreads through her.

“You’ve come home to me,” she says with her eyes closed, almost too afraid to look down at him and find that it’s all a farce, that it’s not really him or not even his hand that is a stroke and slide, a knead and rub on her belly. “You’ve come home to _us._ ”

“Aye, milady,” he grates out, his voice like metal dragged over stone. “Think you me a liar?”

Sansa looks down at him at that, her eyes wide to see the vaguest curl of a smile there in the black of his beard. She would swat him if he weren’t so badly beaten up, stitched through the front and back of both right shoulder and leg, so instead she contents herself with covering his hand with her own. A sweet many-tiered dessert of a family: unborn babe, father, mother.

“I was so scared, Jon. I love you so much and when I saw you fall off your horse, I- oh, it almost killed me,” she says, reaching out to trace his hairline with a fingertip, and it’s then that he opens his eyes.

“You love me,” he says, heavy as a stone, and it drops into the pool of her heart when his gaze wades through milk of the poppy to look up and focus on her. Sansa nods, and her heart hurts to see the look of sheer relief on his face, the slow spread of smoothed out features, the slack in his jaw, the warmth in his eyes.

“Yes,” she whispers.

 “I told myself I’d gladly die just to hear you say it,” he says. “I told myself I would die a peaceful, happy man, if I knew that I had your heart,” he says, and he closes his eyes with a ragged sigh. “A happy man I am.”

“Jon!” she cries, her hand a firm press on his forehead as she leans over him, their hands still pressed to her belly as she stares down at him, and then she does swat him, light as a feather on the crown of his head when he grins. “That is _not_ funny, ser.”

“Sorry, my lady,” he murmurs.

“’My love,’ you mean,” she corrects.

“Yes, yes, that is what I mean,” he says, voice not so rough now though it is a hazy, poppy-wine wander. “Come then, my love, lie down and tell me of this gift right here,” he says with another knead of his fingers into her flesh. “How long as it been, hmm?”

“I’m not _entirely_ sure,” she says with a smile as she carefully, carefully scoots down to stretch out by his side, her skirts a twist around her ankles as she rests on her side, elbow to the pillow and her head in her hand.

Jon is a constant five fingered roam across her belly, down to her hip, wherever he can reach with overworking his battered shoulder.

“I hope it is from that night, that last night of ours,” he murmurs, his eyes closing once more as he starts to drift off. “Or should I say the first,” he smiles, drowsing now like a weary pup, cradled and rocked to sleep with his own sweet thoughts. “Was it then, d’you think, you with your woman’s ken?”

Sansa hesitates a moment with her lip bitten between her teeth. The first, second, third and all subsequent counting when her blood never came all told her she was already well pregnant when they dove into one another. She watches the shape of his profile as the firelight flickers over it, as sleep slowly claims him though it apparently can do nothing to take  the smile off of his mouth.

“Is that something you’d want, Jon?”

“To put a babe in you when you finally let me love you?” he huffs, incredulous even as mired as he is in thick sedation. “Oh yes. That I want very much.”

“Then yes. Yes, that’s when it was, counted down to the very day, and we women know. The very moment you- we- that very moment, my love, that’s when it happened,” she says, kissing his brow, his cheek, the usually so serious pluck of his mouth that stretches now in that lazy smile.

“Good.”                                                                           


End file.
